Johannesburg, – Payroll is one of the most important functions of the organisation. It’s the key to the engaged employee, to the retention and attraction of high-end talent, and into ensuring seamless benefit and payment management across multiple silos and geographical locations. It is visibility into employee cost to company and discrepancies in expenditure across diversity and inclusion metrics that are increasingly influencing investor and customer decision making. It is also often neglected with inefficiencies adding complexity and reducing its value to the company.
Considering the strategic value that payroll offers the business, these inefficiencies need to be addressed so that companies can maximize value, improve engagement, and transform visibility. As McKinsey points out in its recent analysis of how corporate functions need to be revised in order to better support growth, payroll is one of the functions that needs to be highly responsive to the needs of business units as this is one step towards ensuring that it best meets the needs of the business and maximises its value proposition. However, beyond that is the need to look at how a streamlined payroll platform simply removes unnecessary complexity so that people are paid properly regardless of currency, benefits package and geography.
“One of the greatest challenges for companies growing globally is to find a payroll system that’s capable of keeping them legislatively and tax compliant,” says Stephen Howe, co-founder and director at Times 3 Technologies, a local IT company that helps people and business using intuitive cloud software through Sage. “Every country has different mandated requirements for payroll systems and some do not accept certain types of platforms, which means that companies find themselves juggling multiple payroll solutions across different employees and jurisdictions. This is not ideal, and often results in unnecessary errors and time-consuming admin.”
The challenge is to find a payroll platform and service provider that can tick the compliance box from the outset. One that understands the nuances of payroll across multiple markets and that is capable of adapting to meet different regulatory requirements. Failing to be payroll compliant can impact on a company’s local reputation, result in fines, and result in employees being held liable for company errors.
“This is a huge consideration,” says Howe. “When expanding its global footprint, the last thing a company needs is to be held liable for unexpected penalties or to lose reputation as a result of a simple payroll error. In addition, a lack of payroll compliance can result in the employee being held liable as well as the company, which isn’t going to reflect well on either. It can also impact a company’s talent acquisition strategy – talent is hard to find, and most highly skilled people do their research before they commit.”
Having a trusted payroll platform can make a significant difference when it comes to payroll efficiencies, with the added bonus of ensuring that benefits packages are structured in alignment with local expectations and that payments are made on time, without error. It will also provide the global organisation with reporting insights across multiple countries which will rapidly identify areas of interest or concern before they become a problem, or impact on employee retention.
“Companies need one system that encompasses the complete employee profile across both payroll and HR functions,” says Howe. “This will ensure that payroll is compliant and legislatively accurate across all employee profiles in multiple jurisdictions, and ensure that they are all paid on time. Employees value this level of reliability and feel that they can then trust in the company, which improves engagement and enriches the culture of the organisation.”
Payroll’s tendrils loop into every part of the organisation, from wellness to culture to compliance to budgets. A well-run payroll can track income, expenses, company expenses, reporting, audits, productivity, leave, absenteeism, overtime and more. And if every one of these elements is 100% comprehensively aligned to business strategy, then high-growth companies can expand into new territories, confident that payroll is precise, resilient, and capable enough to handle the influx of talent, and the complexity of regulation and compliance.
Times 3 Technologies, a Sage Platinum Partner, would agree as the market leader in providing companies with one of the strongest performing, cloud-connected payroll solutions on the market – Sage 300 People. This platform is focused on process efficiency and productivity that’s accessed anywhere, scalable and customisable to suit any industry and sector and ensures that companies are compliant and employees are paid on time. With this tool in their corporate toolbox, companies can track performance, measure productivity, improve training mandates in the future, enhance recruitment and fundamentally transform the role of payroll within the organisation.
